This chapter will first trace the development and emergence
of the contemporary diasporic person (identified here as the transnational
nomad), as distinct from the traditional historical diasporic person
(identified here as the "migrant" or "exile"): a development
made possible by the structural offensive of transnational capital whose
contemporary history I have already described.
I argue that contemporary cosmopolitan persons everywhere are
diasporic, that is, in dispersion. For my purposes here, the cosmopolis
signifies New York, Toronto, Rome, London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, Miami, San
Francisco, Los Angeles, or any megalopolis (or digital world city) with a
sizable demographic mix of first-world citizens and immigrant-citizens of
third-world heritage. To clarify: economic migrants and political exiles still
cross the borders of nation-states, to be sure, but I want to argue ultimately,
that nomadic subjectivity has epistemological and political ramifications for
post-millennial theoretical enterprises.
Let’s begin with the historical context. The Greek word
diaspora, which means dispersion, was first used by Thucydides in The
Peloponnesian War to describe the exile of the population of Aegina. (Pace, the
Greek word oikos, which means home, and barbarus, foreign, the etymon of "barbarian".) The Hebrew
word galut was employed in The Old Testament to refer to the forced
exile of Jews from Jerusalem to Babylon in 586 BC. The term was later used in
the sense of dispersion to describe the Christian communities scattered across
the Roman Empire before it adopted Christianity as the state religion.
Traditional use of "diaspora" is often associated with Jewish people.
But once the term is applied to other religious or ethnic
groups, it becomes immediately apparent how difficult it is in many cases to
find a definition that makes a clear distinction between a migration and a
diaspora, or between a minority and a diaspora. For instance, diaspora isn't
used when discussing the presence of British immigrants in Australia, New
Zealand, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Canada, and the US. Nor is the word
applied to the many German colonies in (the then) Central and Eastern Europe
and in several Latin American countries. Pierre George, the geographer, has
used instead the expression "minorities of superiority" to refer to
these migrants and exiles who continue to retain their identities as Germans,
whom they see as culturally superior.
Western (traditional) notions of diaspora can be loosely
defined in three ways: first, as the collective forced dispersion of a
religious and or ethnic group, precipitated by a disaster, often political;
second, considering the role played by collective memory, which transmits both
the historical facts that precipitated the dispersion and a broadly understood
cultural heritage; and third, the group's will to transmit its heritage in
order to preserve its identity, no matter the degree of integration or attempt
at assimilation, that is, the will to survive as a minority by transmittal of
heritage.
Within the framework of the traditional Western organization
of knowledge and history, there are many diasporas in many first-world
cosmopolitan areas--each represented usually in enclaves and each classified as
a domestic cultural minority. Thus, there are myriad diasporas scattered all
over the Western cosmopolis: Jewish; Armenian; Gypsy; African; Chinese;
subcontinental Indian; Irish; Greek; Lebanese; Palestinian; Vietnamese;
Cambodian; and Korean. And so on.
Two (traditional) Western conceptions subvent these notions
of diaspora: The first traditional conception is the conception of the identity
of self, which was refined in the mid-twentieth century by phenomenology and
existentialism, and which emphasized the primacy of the categories of perception
and experience: the unitary "I" (that is, the conscious subject,
always identical and present to itself and always opposed to the other) is
viewed as the only legitimate organizer and controller of perception and
experience. These notions of the "I" assumed the integrity (the
indivisibility) of the normative and universal (Western) self outside the
differences and vicissitudes of culture and history.
The second traditional conception is the Jacobin imaginary
(one legacy of the French Revolution underpinning the liberal wing of the
Enlightenment) that for the past two hundred and some years in the West has
supervised the idea of society as a rational and transparent order grounded on
a single principle that accounts for a whole field of differences. In the
operation of this imaginary, the category of representation was supposed to
discover a common essence beneath differences, to search for the structures
that constitute the inherent law of all possible variations, and to establish
the normative requirements for a single democratic logic that will rule
society. Historical events, however, have transformed these traditional notions
of diaspora.
In the mid to late twentieth century, the disintegration of
European imperialist networks and the emergence of various decolonization
movements, the ever-changing social formations and modes of production under
the aegis of capitalism, and the politics of the defunct cold war have had
several ramifications, among which, because of the many military, social, economic,
and political practices corollary to these developments, first-world countries
now have a sizable and expanding number of first- and second-generation
citizens with third-world heritage.
These (post)colonial citizens within the first world have
contributed enormously to: a certain globalization that traverses races,
languages, and social formations; the questioning of the meaning of the
nation-state itself; the fact of heterogeneity, plurality, and community; the
production of a variety of cultural economies and texts; and the politics of
cultural memory in the (de)configuration of national identities, discourses,
and ideologies. My point is that there is currently a robust (and even
exponential) diasporic drift across countries, continents, races, languages,
and religions because of the reconfiguration of international capital and
labor, and because of the economic and social fallout from the ethnic
antagonisms that thawed out after the freeze of the cold war.
More specifically in domestic US, before the end of the cold
war, the politics of difference articulated by the liberation movements of the
1960s and 1970s--by groups aligned with the categories of race, gender, class,
national origin, and sexual orientation--insisted on cultural differences (pace
"multiculturalism") as the basis of identity. And in the third world,
the decolonization movements of the late 1950s and 1960s fomented the active
rediscovery of difference among racial and ethnic groups within large and
complex societies.
Thus, "identity politics" became precisely the
practice that militated against normative and fixed (Western) notions of
identity that had usually hierarchized those categories of difference for
discrimination and subordination. And "multiculturalism" got its
critical purchase because it linked various identity struggles with a common
rhetoric of difference and resistance. But I want to focus on only one of these
"historical events": the various transformations of capital—aided by
technology--that have disrupted traditional conceptions of identity, and that
in turn have prepared the terrain for the emergence of the contemporary nomad,
as distinct from the migrant or the exile, an emergence whose conditions of
possibility were produced by transnational (or postnational) capital.
Both the new nomad in the city and the city itself have been
put into the orbit of the time-light of speed. Let's discuss and analyze and
the attributes of this new nomad--in the new city that has also become the
deterritorialized desert: The nomadic person that has emerged, at this
post-millennial stage of transnational capital, in the overexposed
city-become-desert.
Contemporary discourses have shown us that the notion of the
"individual" offers a fiction of cohesion that bears as its symptom
the belief in a fully enabled and self-conscious power. And of course the
notion of the subject in turn offers the contradictory senses of (1) the
enabling and controlling and (arguably) sovereign subject of power and
discourses, and at the same time (2) the subject dispersed, subjected to--and
at conflict with--linguistic, social, and cultural formations, and legal,
political, and economic institutions. Then we have the notion of
subject-positions that an "individual" or person occupies, positions
that have their own discourses and histories, some of which that
"person" is born into, and others that the "person" has
chosen. These subject-positions are sometimes contradictory and never cohere to
form a complete "individual." For example: one "person" or
"individual" can be fractured by the subject-positions of Ethiopian,
Jewish, mother, lesbian, physically handicapped, conservative environmentalist,
radical amateur economist, and "leftist" political columnist. This
person, who in fact is none other than our nomadic subject, will occupy all
these various positions from day to day in discourse and society (with respect
to institutions and other people) and will have to negotiate all the tensions
attendant to these positions from day to day, depending on the context.
The nomad, thoroughly traversed, perhaps animated, perhaps
conflicted, by historical, ethnic, and cultural differences, is a product of
the transnational (or postnational) capitalist rewriting of social relations
and labor production (or put another way: the reconfiguration of the
international division of capital and labor), is more often than not
multilingual, and is, as we have said, an American citizen with third-world
heritage living in a megalopolis in the US. This postcolonial American understands
well that these subject-positions are affiliations, again, some that s/he was
born into, and some that s/he has chosen. The question for this different kind
of American is how to thematize these affiliations, recognizing them as sites
of conflict and struggle rather than as sites of identity.
This postcolonial American is one version of Edward Said's
"cultural amphibian" or Homi Bhabha's "cultural hybrid,"
but contrary to both Said's and Bhabha's figure of the migrant intellectual
"floating upward from history, from memory, from time," I argue that
this polyglot nomad is neither exile nor migrant as such. The migrant has a
close tie to class structure: In most countries, migrants are the most
economically disadvantaged who have minimal or zero stored time, more or less
marginal to the neo-Fordist network. And the exile is often motivated by
political reasons and does not often coincide with the poor.
In
contrast, our nomad does not stand for homelessness (not no passport but
several passports) or compulsive displacement but is rather a figuration of the
kind of subject who has no desire or recidivist nostalgia. This figuration
articulates the desire for a site of conflicts made of transitions, successive
shifts, coordinated changes, repetitions, cyclical moves, and rhythmic
displacements. To repeat somewhat and to clarify: both the (basically economic)
migrant and (basically political) exile belong to the Fordist phase of Capital,
while the (basically cultural and epistemological) nomad belongs to Capital's
neo-Fordist phase.
The nomad is the prototype of the man or woman of ideas: As
Gilles Deleuze puts it, the point of being an intellectual nomad is about
crossing boundaries, about the act of going, regardless of the destination. To
paraphrase Deleuze: The life of the nomad is the intermezzo; she is a vector of
deterritorialization. The nomad enacts transitions without a teleological
purpose. Nomadic consciousness is also an epistemological position because it
allows the transdisciplinary propagation of concepts and multiple
interconnections and transmigrations of notions from one domain of knowledge to
another. On a more general level, the history of ideas is always a nomadic
story: ideas are as mortal as humans and as subjected as humans to the
unpredictable twists and turns of history.
The figure of the nomad, as distinct from that of the exile or
the migrant, allows us to think of international dispersion and dissemination
of ideas not only on the banal and hegemonic model of tourist or traveler but
also as forms of resistance to collective amnesia. The distinctions among the
exile, the migrant, and the nomad also correspond to different styles and
different relationships to time. The mode and tense of exile style are based on
an acute sense of foreignness, coupled with the often hostile perception of the
host country.
Exile literature, for instance, is marked by a sense of loss
or separation from the home country, which for political reasons, is a lost
horizon: Memory, reminiscence, and recollection--crucial to the traditional
diasporic style--are central to this mode of writing. On the other hand, the
migrant is caught in an in-between state in which the narrative of origin
destabilizes the present. Migrant literature is about a suspended, often
impossible present, nostalgia, and blocked horizons: The past functions as a
burden, lingering into the present, and characters live in the frozen sense of
their own cultural identity; self-representation, as a moment of absolute
authenticity and authority, is privileged over all other representations.
Migrant consciousness leads to one extreme form of identity politics, in which
each culture is self-referential and so autonomous in its own authority that it
can never be understood in a space outside itself. The nomadic tense is active,
affirmative, and continuous because the trajectory is controlled speed. The
nomadic style is about transitions and passages without predetermined
destinations or lost homelands. Nomadic artistic practice is fluid,
transgressive, and transitory, and is about temporal displacements, zigzags of
flashbacks and future tenses, and speed montages of bodies and events moving
through time and space. This practice therefore exceeds the ideology and
institution of literature, and belongs more appropriately to the art-form of
cinema: precisely my point in Chapter 2, where my close analysis of Ridley
Scott’s Bladerunner disclosed nomads and machines functioning in visual machines.
The nomad's relationship to the earth is one of transitory
attachment and cyclical frequency. To quote Deleuze now: "The nomads are
there, on the land, wherever they are they form a smooth space that gnaws, and
tends to grow, in all directions. The nomads inhabit these places; they remain
in them, and they themselves make them grow, for it has been established that
nomads make the desert no less than they are made by it."
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